Tag Archives for australia

Today I spent some time hacking together an ownership graph of Australian newspapers. Spoiler: it’s all owned by News Limited and Fairfax, but click on the pretty picture below and you can see exactly how stuffed it is in an ugly interactive physics based format where you can click and drag stuff around.

Arrows indicate ownership of course, with X–>Y meaning that X owns Y. You can see the code if you want. I might make it less ugly in the future but for now, it is what it is.

You can’t trust the national school chaplaincy program. The people involved in it at the highest levels are outright, blatant liars whose aims are to proselytise, indoctrinate and convert. Here is the proof:

And really, is it surprising? You can’t give a religious organisation exclusive access to apply for these “counselor” type roles, and then tell them not to proselytise. Have you ever heard the story of the scorpion and the frog? “Sure thing, no proselytising going on here, wink wink nudge nudge”.

Of course the people who brought it in (John Howard) and the people who sustain it (Julia Gillard) know this. They are lying to the Australian public to appease the conservative demographic. The members of this demographic also know full well that the public is being lied to, yet most do not oppose the program. To those people I would say simply this: thou shalt not lie. Read the ten commandments: thou shalt not lie. If you believe in the bible, if you believe in honesty, you should be just as outraged as I am.

Let’s be honest, if the goal isn’t about converting students, why can’t non-religious people apply for the roles? Why are we wasting tax payer money funding the equivalent of door knocking evangelists?